By Joe Martino
insights.collective-evolution.com

It can feel disorienting when everything is upside down. But not much changes on Earth when things don’t feel upside down. It’s a paradox to an extent, but when things are upside down and weird, people start talking.

Talk is the beginning of breaking the illusion, the beginning of curiosity and exploring other possibilities…even if at first it’s hugely polarized and chaotic.

I am sure that somewhere in our universe, beings living on their planet don’t need as much impetus to change before they do. Individuals and society continue to evolve and grow even without a boatload of weirdness and chaos. But for now, it’s useful to see OUR planetary weirdness as an evolutionary pressure for us. We need it.

Ultimately, what I’m talking about here, and what I think most people want, is to feel good, enjoy life, and find a sense of peace most of the time…even as our world is weird and in chaos. After all, who wants to feel on edge, anxious and or hopeless all day long?

Said another way, people, including myself, want to be able to orient when things feel disorienting. Constant disorientation makes it tough to know what to do, how to feel, where to go, etc. It’s survival. Our biological being is not meant to be in survival for more than a couple of minutes at a time.

One key ingredient in this is the acceptance that as chaos and weirdness rise, people start talking. THAT becomes the beginning of change.

The beginning of change is people paying attention

Take a moment and breathe that in. Feel that in your body–the idea that peace can be taken and found in the acceptance of the moment. It sounds too simple, but it’s often overlooked, all while many folks out there constantly yell that the sky is falling because they want you to join them in their survival stress.

I look back to 2009 when talking about so many of the things that are completely commonplace today; we were on the extreme fringe back then. Very few were paying attention to what hundreds of millions (if not more) are paying attention to now.

People are talking. They are paying attention. And with that, instability grows. Why? Because we can collectively handle it.

We are building the early layers of what we can handle navigating. The scaffolding is going up. We can handle more polarity, more complexity, and more uncertainty because we are starting to have the framing that states: The world does not work in the way we were taught.

That framing is support–a container for the next steps

In knowing this process, we can let a little tension go. A little less survival energy can be there as the framing provides a sense of orientation.

What initially got more people talking was a rise of weirdness and an information infrastructure that could disseminate other perspectives. Then, as more and more people opened to other perspectives, a greater collective was able to hold more conversations about it, creating the support for more to come on board.

Now, the next steps of navigating complexity, polarity, and moving out of the fear and survival stress of our moment is going to be the knowledge and practice of how to do so.

After all, a new world cannot be built on top of the survival stress of our past. Otherwise, it’s the same thing we have now.

We’re not waiting for new solutions or new policies or new ideas to change the external world, we are waiting for an evolved human to emerge – AND it’s happening. No, not a fifth-dimensional all-seeing god-human, just one that isn’t locked up in the survival physiology that has been ingrained in us (and added to) for generations.

It’s happening in those attuning to a more grounded, slow, healed, and regulated version of themselves. It takes work, but it’s change at its core. That work is the next bit of scaffolding that will hold greater change. It goes right down to our individual and collective nervous system.

As I’ve always said: “we will only see as much change in our world as we have the capacity to hold it.” There is an intelligence behind how our world moves and evolves. How our galaxy and universe evolve. I personally don’t call it God or see it that way, but you might, and that works, too.

The key factor is we play a role in it all. It’s not happening to us or by the will of that intelligence; we have the free will to decide individually and collectively where we go.

It’s about becoming active players

We have a course coming out soon on becoming an active player, but typically, this idea is made up of two ingredients: our own inner transformation and our ability to make sense of our situation (society included) meaningfully. These two ingredients happen to be the entire basis of Collective Evolution’s (CE) work over the last 15 years as well.

I want to leave people with something to do at the end of this piece, so I will point to one way to get started on a basic end of inner transformation and how to dive deeper into these topics via our podcast.

My Five Days of You Challenge is something I put together over a decade ago and is a powerful simple challenge that slows life down and gets you more in touch with yourself. I highly recommend it.

Further, dive deeper into the nature of our current moment via the Collective Evolution Show. From identifying the collective challenges we face to exploring the solutions that will help us through the current shift in consciousness we are experiencing, the first seven episodes of the CE Podcast venture through these questions and topics. Check them out.

Ep. 1 Humanity’s Predicament
Ep. 2 The Meaning Crisis
Ep. 3 Sensemaking, Fake News & Censorship
Ep: 4 Social Media, Desensitization, Cultural Decline
Ep. 5 Trauma, Embodiment & Being
Ep. 6 Interconnection & A Pathway To Change
Ep. 7 Technophobia & The Great Reset

Originally published at insights.collective-evolution.com